Collaborate Disseminate
Remote working has become so normal that even important meetings are now routinely held online. But for those working from home there’s always the risk of pets or flatmates entering …read more Continue reading Automatic On Air Light Prevents Distractions During Online Meetings
There are a lot of IoT solutions and frameworks out there, and [Davide] demonstrates how to make a simple data logging and tracking application with his ESP8266-to-ThingSpeak project, which reads …read more Continue reading NTC Thermistor to ThingSpeak Meter Makes a Great IoT Starter Project
Remember the Great Toilet Paper Crisis of 2020? We sure do, and it looks like our old friend [Vije Miller] does as well, while seemingly harboring a somewhat morbid fascination …read more Continue reading Keep Track of Toilet Paper Usage with This IoT Roll Holder
Home weather stations are a great way for hackers and makers to put their skills to practical use. After all, who wants to hear the current conditions for the whole city when they could setup their own station which drills that information down to their very own street? Such a setup doesn’t need to be any more complex than a temperature sensor wired up to a microcontroller, but then not all of us are quite the weather fanatic that [Richard] clearly is.
The system he’s built to monitor the wind over his home is, to put it mildly, incredible. We …read more
It was only a matter of time. Everything else is getting its data logged and reported to the Internet for detailed analysis, so why should our rodents be any different? The cover story is that [Nicole Horward] hooked her pet hamster Harold up to the web because she wanted to see if he was getting as much exercise as he should. The real reason is, of course, that Harold wanted to show off to his “friends” on Hamsterbook.
The hardware side of this hack is very simple, a magnetic door sensor (like the kind used in alarm systems) is used …read more
For the last few months, I had been using Sparkfun’s Phant server as a data logger for a small science project. Unfortunately, they’ve had some serious technical issues and have discontinued the service. Phant was good while it lasted: it was easy to use, free, and allowed me to download the data in a CSV format. It shared data with analog.io, which at the time was a good solution for data visualization.
While I could continue using Phant since it is an open-source project and Sparkfun kindly releases the source code for the server on Github, I thought it might …read more
Continue reading Review: IoT Data Logging Services with MQTT
If only Marv and Harry were burglars today; they might have found it much easier to case houses and — perhaps — would know which houses were occupied by technically inclined kids by capitalizing on the potential vulnerability that [Luc Volders] has noticed on ThingSpeak.
As an IoT service, ThingSpeak takes data from an ESP-8266, graphs it, and publicly displays the data. Some of you may already see where this is going. While [Volders] was using the service for testing, he realized anyone could check the temperature of his man-cave — thereby inferring when the house was vacant since the …read more
Continue reading Your Internet of Things Speaks Volumes About You
Physicist and squirrel gastronomer [Carsten Dannat] is trying to correlate two critical social economical factors: how many summer days do we have left, and when will we run out of nuts. His research project, the Squirrel Café, invites squirrels to grab some free nuts and collects interesting bits of customer data in return.
Animals are said to have a predictive sense for natural events, and [Carsten’s] experiment is about verifying this. The hypothesis [Carsten] is trying to prove with this setup is the following:
The amount of nuts taken by red squirrels from a squirrel feeder correlates with upcoming winter
Continue reading Squirrel Café To Predict The Weather From Customer Data